TIL: Things I Learned Today

[shazow]

(Experiment of maintaining a list of TIL links in this thread.)

[shazow]

Baba Is You game was inspired by the Bouba/Kiki effect. (Via Recurse Center Zulip)

[shazow]

systemctl set-environment (Via https://fmnxl.com/blog/setting-up-nix-binary-cache/)

$ systemctl --user set-environment FOO=bar
$ systemd-run --user env
$ journalctl -e | grep FOO
Aug 26 11:55:21 mycomputer env[12624]: FOO=bar
$ systemctl --user unset-environment FOO

Questions:

• Is it possible to use systemd-run to run something interactively? Such as, to print $FOO from the systemd environment into the current shell without using systemctl show-environment.
• How is systemd-run --shell used? (Can't find great examples)

[shazow]

Origin story of the Hamster Dance website:

Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte (of Nanaimo, British Columbia) was in a competition with her best friend and sister to generate the most Web traffic when she created the Hampster Dance page in August 1998. She named the site Hampton's Hamster House in homage to her pet hamster, "Hampton Hamster", who on the page declared his intent to become a "Web star." [...]

More details in this interview: https://www.cbc.ca/arts/the-oral-history-of-the-hampsterdance-the-twisted-true-story-of-one-of-the-world-s-first-memes-1.4958325

[shazow]

We can implement Conway's Game of Life inside of itself, recursively: http://www.amandaghassaei.com/blog/2020/05/01/the-recursive-universe/

[shazow]

https://nownownow.com/ via https://sive.rs/nowff (via https://vinayak.io/now/) - A well-known /now path on your domain where you describe what you're up to.

Clicked around on some random ones, surprised how many were updated this year.

[shazow]

There's 2 common wavelengths for IR LEDs: 850nm and 940nm. 850nm is closer to the visible spectrum so can emit a bit of visible light, but also illuminates much better for cameras.

Via @mmchugh

[shazow]

It turns out that molecules move unimaginably quickly due to thermal motion. A small molecule such as glucose is cruising around a cell at about 250 miles per hour, while a large protein molecule is moving at 20 miles per hour. ... In addition, a typical protein is tumbling around, a million times per second. Imagine proteins crammed together, each rotating at 60 million RPM, with molecules slamming into them billions of times a second. This is what's going on inside a cell.

http://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowded-places.html

[shazow]

Racist origins of the Grandfather Clause, often used when changing pricing of subscription services.

[shazow]

Current Events portal on Wikipedia, a neutral-ish daily news summary.

[shazow]

OpenSSH and OpenBSD were made by Theo de Raadt, a software engineer in living Calgary. OpenSSH was a forked from the first SSH implementation when the project's license switched from open source to proprietary.

[shazow]

Ontario's Bruce Nuclear Generating Station is currently the highest capacity active nuclear power station in the world.

The station produced 49.02 TWh of output in 2017 (roughly equivalent to the entire questionably-estimated Bitcoin mining electricity use in 2020).

The Bruce nuclear station also produces Cobalt-60 and Lutetium-177 isotopes used for medical devices and cancer treatment.

💓☢️

Notes:

• List of nuclear power stations
• Possible 2nd highest? Can't tell how much of the Kori Nuclear Power Plant is active.

[shazow]

The name of Martha's Vineyard has nothing to do with Martha Stewart. It was named after an English colonizer's deceased daughter Martha in the early 1600s.